Essays in Radical Empiricism, by William James

12

Absolutism and Empiricism

Reprinted from Mind, vol. IX, No. 34, April, 1884.

No seeker of truth can fail to rejoice at the terre-à-terre sort of discussion of the issues between Empiricism and
Transcendentalism (or, as the champions of the latter would probably prefer to say, between Irrationalism and
Rationalism) that seems to have begun in Mind.113 It would seem as
if, over concrete examples like Mr. J. S. Haldane’s, both parties ought inevitably to come to a better understanding.
As a reader with a strong bias towards Irrationalism, I have studied his article 3 with the liveliest admiration of its
temper and its painstaking effort to be clear. But the cases discussed failed to satisfy me, and I was at first tempted
to write a Note animadverting upon them in detail. The growth of the limb, the sea’s contour, the vicarious functioning
of the nerve-centre, the digitalis curing the heart, are unfortunately not cases where we can
see any through-and-through conditioning of the parts by the whole. They are all cases of reciprocity
where subjects, supposed independently to exist, acquire certain attributes through their relations to other subjects.
That they also exist through similar relations is only an ideal supposition, not verified to our understanding
in these or any other concrete cases whatsoever.

If, however, one were to urge this solemnly, Mr. Haldane’s friends could easily reply that he only gave us such
examples on account of the hardness of our hearts. He knew full well their imperfection, but he hoped that to those who
would not spontaneously ascend to the Notion of the Totality, these cases might prove a spur and suggest and symbolize
something better than themselves. No particular case that can be brought forward is a real concrete. They are all
abstractions from the Whole, and of course the “through-and-through “ character can not be found in them. Each of them
still contains among its elements what we call things, grammatical subjects, forming a
sort of residual caput mortuum of Existence after all the relations that figure in the examples have been told
off. On this “‘existence,” thinks popular philosophy, things may live on, like-the winter bears on their own fat, never
entering relations at all, or, if entering them, entering an entirely different set of them from those treated of in
Mr. Haldane’s examples. Thus if the digitalis were to weaken instead of strengthening the heart, and to produce death
(as sometimes happens), it would determine itself, through determining the organism, to the function of “kill” instead
of that of “cure.” The function and relation seem adventitious, depending on what kind of a heart the digitalis gets
hold of, the digitalis and the heart being facts external and, so to speak, accidental to each other. But this popular
view, Mr. Haldane’s friends will continue, is an illusion. What seems to us the “existence “ of digitalis and heart
outside of the relations of killing or curing, is but a function in a wider system of relations, of which, pro hac
vice, we take no account. The larger system determines the existence just
as absolutely as the system “kill,” or the system “cure,” determined the function of the digitalis. Ascend to
the absolute system, instead of biding with these relative and partial ones, and you shall see that the law of
through-and-throughness must and does obtain.

Of course, this argument is entirely reasonable, and debars us completely from chopping logic about the concrete
examples Mr. Haldane has chosen. It is not his fault if his categories are so fine an instrument that nothing but the
sum total of things can be taken to show us the manner of their use. It is simply our misfortune that he has not the
sum total of things to show it by. Let us fall back from all concrete attempts and see what we can do with his notion
of through-and-throughness, avowedly taken in abstracto. In abstract systems the ” through-and-through “ Ideal
is realized on every hand. In any system, as such, the members are only members in the system. Abolish the
system and you abolish its members, for you have conceived them through no other property than
the abstract one of membership. Neither rightness nor leftness, except through bi-laterality. Neither mortgager nor
mortgagee, except through mortgage. The logic of these cases is this:— If A, then B; but if B, then A: wherefore
if either, Both; and if not Both, Nothing.

It costs nothing, not even a mental effort, to admit that the absolute totality of things may be organized exactly
after the pattern of one of these “ through-and-through “ abstractions. In fact, it is the pleasantest and freest of
mental movements. Husband makes, and is made by, wife, through marriage; one makes other, by being itself other;
everything self-created through its opposite — you go round like a squirrel in a cage. But if you stop and reflect upon
what you are about, you lay bare the exact point at issue between common sense and the ” through-and-through “
school.

What, in fact, is the logic of these abstract systems? It is, as we said above: If any Member, then the Whole
System; if not the Whole System, then Nothing. But how can Logic possibly do anything more with
these two hypotheses than combine them into the single disjunctive proposition — “Either this Whole System, just as it
stands, or Nothing at all.” Is not that disjunction the ultimate word of Logic in the matter, and can any disjunction,
as such, resolve itself? It may be that Mr. Haldane sees how one horn, the concept of the Whole System,
carries real existence with it. But if he has been as unsuccessful as I in assimilating the Hegelian re-editings of the
Anselmian proof,114 he will have to say that though Logic may determine
what the system must be, if it is, something else than Logic must tell us that it is. Mr.
Haldane in this case would probably consciously, or unconsciously, make an appeal to Fact: the disjunction is decided,
since nobody can dispute that now, as a matter of fact, something, and not nothing, is. We must
therefore, he would probably say, go on to admit the Whole System in the desiderated sense. Is not then the
validity of the Anselm -ian proof the nucleus of the whole question between Logic and Fact?
Ought not the efforts of Mr. Haldane and his friends to be principally devoted to its elucidation? Is it not the real
door of separation between Empiricism and Rationalism? And if the Rationalists leave that door for a moment off its
hinges, can any power keep that abstract, opaque, unmediated, external, irrational, and irresponsible monster, known to
the vulgar as bare Fact, from getting in and contaminating the whole sanctuary with his presence? Can anything prevent
Faust from changing “Am Anfang war das Wort” into “Am Anfang war die That? ”

Nothing in earth or heaven. Only the Anselmian proof can keep Fact out of philosophy. The question, “Shall Fact be
recognized as an ultimate principle? “ is the whole issue between the Rationalists and the Empiricism of vulgar
thought.

Of course, if so recognized, Fact sets a limit to the ” through-and-through “ character of the world’s rationality.
That rationality might then mediate between all the members of our conception of the world, but
not between the conception itself and reality. Reality would have to be given, not by Reason, but by Fact. Fact holds
out blankly, brutally and blindly, against that universal deliquescence of everything into logical relations which the
Absolutist Logic demands, and it is the only thing that does hold out. Hence the ire of the Absolutist Logic -hence its
non-recognition, its ‘cutting’ of Fact.

The reasons it gives for the ‘cutting’ are that Fact is speechless, a mere word for the negation of thought, a
vacuous unknowability, a dog-in-the-manger, in truth, which having no rights of its own, can find nothing else to do
than to keep its betters out of theirs.

There are two points involved here: first the claim that certain things have rights that are absolute, ubiquitous
and all pervasive, and in regard to which nothing else can possibly exist in its own right; and second that anything
that denies this assertion is pure negativity with no positive context whatsoever.

Take the latter point first. Is it true that what is negative in one way is thereby convicted of incapacity to be
positive in any other way? The word “ Fact “ is like the word “ Accident,” like the word “Absolute” itself. They all
have their negative connotation. In truth, their whole connotation is negative and relative. All it says is that,
whatever the thing may be that is denoted by the words, other things do not control it. Where fact, where
accident is, they must be silent, it alone can speak. But that does not prevent its speaking as loudly as you please,
in its own tongue. It may have an inward life, self-transparent and active in the maximum degree. An indeterminate
future volition on my part, for example, would be a strict accident as far as my present self is concerned. But that
could not prevent it, in the moment in which it occurred, from being possibly the most intensely living and
luminous experience I ever had. Its quality of being a brute fact ab extra says nothing whatever as to its inwardness.
It simply says to outsiders: 'Hands off!'

And this brings us back to the first point of the Absolutist indictment of Fact. Is that point really anything more
than a fantastic dislike to letting anything say ‘Hands off ‘? What else explains the contempt the Absolutist
authors exhibit for a freedom defined simply on its “ negative “ side, as freedom “from,” etc.? What else prompts them
to deride such freedom? But, dislike for dislike, who shall decide? Why is not their dislike at having me “from” them,
entirely on a par with mine at having them “through” me?

I know very well that in talking of dislikes to those who never mention them, I am doing a very coarse thing, and
making a sort of intellectual Orson of myself. But, for the life of me, I can not help it, because I feel sure that
likes and dislikes must be among the ultimate factors of their philosophy as well as of mine. Would they but
admit it! How sweetly we then could hold converse together! There is something finite about us both, as we now stand.
We do not know the Absolute Whole yet. Part of it is still negative to us. Among the
whats of it Still stalks a mob of opaque thats, without which we cannot think. But just as I admit that this is all
possibly provisional that even the Anselmian proof may come out all right, and creation may be a rational system
through-and-through, why might they not also admit that it may all be otherwise, and that the shadow, the opacity, the
negativity, the “from “-ness, the plurality that is ultimate, may never be wholly driven from the scene. We should both
then be avowedly making hypotheses, playing with Ideals. Ah! Why is the notion of hypothesis so abhorrent to the
Hegelian mind?

And once down on our common level of hypothesis, we might then admit scepticism, since the Whole is not yet
revealed, to be the soundest logical position. But since we are in the main not sceptics, we might go on and frankly
confess to each other the motives for our several faiths. I frankly confess mine — I can not but think that at bottom
they are. of an aesthetic and not of a logical sort. The “through-and-through” universe seems to suffocate me with its infallible impeccable allpervasiveness. Its necessity, with no possibilities; its
relations, with no subjects, make me feel as if I had entered into a contract with no reserved rights, or rather as if
I had to live in a large seaside boarding-house with no private bed-room in which I might take refuge from the society
of the place. I am distinctly aware, moreover, that the old quarrel of sinner and pharisee has something to do with the
matter. Certainly, to my personal knowledge, all Hegelians are not prigs, but I somehow feel as if all prigs ought to
end, if developed, by becoming Hegelians. There is a story of two clergymen asked by mistake to conduct the same
funeral. One came first and had got no farther than “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” when the other entered. “I am
the Resurrection and the Life,” cried the latter. The “through-and-through” philosophy, as it actually exists, reminds
many of us of that clergyman. It seems too buttoned-up and white-chokered and clean-shaven a thing to speak for the
vast slow-breathing unconscious Kosmos with its dread abysses and its unknown tides. The
“freedom” we want to see there is not the freedom, with a string tied to its leg and warranted not to fly
away, of that philosophy. “Let it fly away,” we say, “from us I What then?”

Again, I know I am exhibiting my mental grossness. But again, Ich kann nicht anders. I show my feelings;
why will they not show theirs? I know they have a personal feeling about the through-and-through universe,
which is entirely different from mine, and which I should very likely be much the better for gaining if they would only
show me how. Their persistence in telling me that feeling has nothing to do with the question, that it is a pure matter
of absolute reason, keeps me for ever out of the pale. Still seeing a that in things which Logic does not
expel, the most I can do is to aspire to the expulsion. At present I do not even aspire. Aspiration is a
feeling. What can kindle feeling but the example of feeling? And if the Hegelians will refuse to set an example, what
can they expect the rest of us to do? To speak more seriously, the one fundamental
quarrel Empiricism has with Absolutism is over this repudiation by Absolutism of the personal and aesthetic factor in
the construction of philosophy. That we all of us have feelings, Empiricism feels quite sure. That they may be as
prophetic and anticipatory of truth as anything else we have, and some of them more so than others, can not possibly be
denied. But what hope is there of squaring and settling opinions unless Absolutism will hold parley on this common
ground; and will admit that all philosophies are hypotheses, to which all our faculties, emotional as well as logical,
help us, and the truest of which will at the final integration of things be found in possession of the men whose
faculties on the whole had the best divining power?